Wednesday, September 7, 2016

It is a very, very disturbing trend that we're seeing in the Republican Party against free trade. It's always been there but usually confined to a few isolated members, the Jeff Sessions of the world and others, but now it seems to be spreading. (Jeff Flake, From reason.com, 6 Sep 2016)

If you want to know what keeps me up at night more than anything—and there are plenty of threats out there—it's waking up some morning and having the markets already decided that we're not going to buy your debt anymore, or we're only going to buy it at a premium and interest rates are going to have to go up. When that happens, then virtually all of our discretionary or non-military discretionary spending goes just to service the debt and then we are Japan. (Jeff Flake, From reason.com, 6 Sep 2016)

In his six House terms, Flake has carved out a distinct profile as a spending hawk willing to take on anyone — including his own party’s leadership — to curb federal profligacy. When Congress banned spending earmarks in 2010, he could rightly claim to have actually changed Washington.

“A true conservative, Flake is as rare as the dodo,” Esquire wrote in 2008. The Weekly Standard in 2011 called him “a tea partier before there were tea partiers.”
In the years since, the party orthodoxy on spending has only moved closer to Flake. But on other issues, Flake has stuck to his free-market, often libertarian principles even as the party has hardened around other positions, and conservative activists aren’t giving him the benefit of the doubt.